Trippin' with Fran & Ed

How revisiting our younger self can shed light on possibilities ahead.

Fear & Loathing in High School

If you could go back in time, knowing what you know now, what would you tell your younger self? Would you give good advice to relive your life for the better, or offer dire warnings to avoid your biggest mistakes? Would you share your hopes and dreams, or describe whom you actually came to be? Would both of you be proud or ashamed, excited or afraid, optimistic or fatalistic?

In lieu of having a time machine, remembering and sharing stories from our youth is a compelling psychological exercise. Deep in our past specific events triggered us and made us who we are; reminiscing gives us the opportunity to discover our strategies and coping mechanisms, perhaps explore insights to help make our future self more actualized— or at least more self-reflective.

For early peakers high school was the high point of life, the prom kings and queens, honor students and valedictorians, debate team captains and varsity athletes. For slow learners those teen years totally sucked, the dropouts and delinquents, breakfast clubbers and detention junkies. For most of us falling somewhere in between, we took the good with bad, tried to figure it all out.

Looking back I see the mirror image of a rambunctious kid having my adult strengths, weaknesses, and quirkiness, inchoate but already manifest: I was and still am smart but scatter-brained, intuitive yet self-deluded, wise but immature, loud-mouthed yet timid. Forty years later I’m essentially the same person — enduring similar mistakes, enjoying similar successes: meet “me”.

Then like now I had a small but close circle of friends. Ed was big and tall, round-faced and shaggy-haired, bespectacled and introverted; Fran was tall and thin, long-faced and crew-cutted, wide-eyed and extraverted. Ed and I were tight and spent time, Fran spontaneously showing up on a whim, his jittery hysteria dipping into our world only to just as abruptly dip out again.

Also tall, with strong legs and long arms, I inherited the physique of Michael Phelps but the eyes of Mr. Magoo. I could have been a contender — a football, baseball, or swimming champion if not for my nearly incapacitating myopia, astigmatism, and nystagmus. Being unable to clearly see exacerbated my innate introversion, drove me further inside my defiantly eccentric teen head.

So I naturally gravitated toward fellow misfits, burnouts, and slackers like Fran and Ed. We blew off gym class and smoked joints in the parking garages of shopping malls, wore army jackets and never combed our greasy hair, listened to Joy Division and read William S. Burroughs. We had a bad self-image yet acted superior to everyone else, especially those better adjusted.

Drugs were central to our identities, false bravado camouflaging acne-laced pubescent angst. Partying incessantly, we built tolerance to the point our everyday highs got boring — so we boosted the banal like people in LA do with celebrity sightings: no big deal spotting Lady Gaga at the Oscars, but catch her in the plumbing aisle of the Home Depot on Sunset scores you epic points.

Such logic made getting wasted in the basement of Ed’s house on a Tuesday evening cool, but dropping acid for breakfast and tripping through an entire day at school way cooler. Jocks and geeks flexed by winning sports games and chess tournaments; burnouts declared victory by staying fully functional in everyday situations while totally blasted on extremely dangerous drugs.

That’s why I was only mildly interested when Fran and Ed raved about scoring some particularly amazing LSD. My spidey senses started tingling, though, when they also mentioned a car and a Sunday night of hallucinogenic mayhem looming ahead. Not knowing what they had in store increased my thrill immeasurably: I reveled in taking risks with irresponsible risk-takers.

Bromancing the Stoned

That afternoon Ed rolled up to my house with Fran behind the wheel of his dark green MG Midget. The fall of 1979 was an exciting time, especially if you were fifteen-years-old and had absolutely no idea what was going on. In the backdrop the US just bailed out Chrysler, Iranians took hundreds of hostages, and a NORAD false alarm almost triggered WWIII. The more things change…

Fran’s ‘75 convertible roadster was a two-seater, both seats taken. Fran passed a lit joint to Ed, who took a deep drag and passed it to me as I climbed into the tiny crevice between them and the back window. The folding roof plastic buckled as I squeezed my 6'2" 180 pound body inside. Before my first toke Fran jammed the car into gear and we roared off into a waking dream.

Racing through suburbia, I traded the smoldering joint for a bottle of Mickey’s Malt Liquor, the wide-mouthed, beehive-shaped green grenades our favorite. Weeks earlier I’d snuck a sixer into a midnight double-feature of The Who’s The Kids Are Alright and Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels at the Varsity Theatre, slugging them down until projectile vomiting at the first sight of Ringo Starr.

Fully recovered, my latest marijuana and booze binge was in full stride by the time we pulled into a forest preserve, parked the car, and sat at a nondescript bench. Fran doled out the blotter acid like communion wafers: the small paper squares had corrugated edges and surfaces adorned with images of Elvis, Betty Boop, and Richard Nixon; dosages and quality were never certain.

A felony possession, likely made in a bathtub, the actual potency could usually be discerned within about twenty minutes after placing the rough pulp on our tongues. A bum strychnine-laced dose would induce agitation and fill our heads with demons; but a slick pure acid mix tripped our lights fantastic, hurtling us down the rabbit hole, reality dissolving through the lookingglass.

I knew we’d lucked-out with a stellar batch when Ed’s face erupted in flashing red and blue lights, in synch with the Brian Eno song blasting on his JVC boom box. We grooved to the synesthesia until screeching tires, wailing squad car sirens, and shouting police erupted all around us — the harsh jolt shook us back into reality and sent us frantically bolting through the trees for our lives.

The bizarre effects of lysergic acid diethylamide were first experienced by Albert Hofman in 1943 while riding his bicycle back home from the Sandoz lab. His physical activity accentuated the space and time distortion, making for a wild ride. Fran, Ed, and I could relate as we fled the cops through the forest preserve, only to somehow wind up full circle back at his car, leaping in.

Fran was crazy, but kept his cool while wasted and zoomed us out of there. Similar to Ed and me, he was a hyper-focused under-achiever, deeply intense yet totally lost. A couple years older but none the wiser, he wore vintage air force uniforms that were oddly apropos given his legit license earned from flying hundreds of hours in his family’s single-prop Cessna out of Meigs Field.

Like most pilots, aerial bravado made Fran a reckless maniac driving a car, especially when zonked on acid. He compulsively weaved in and out of traffic, haphazardly shifted lanes, freaking everyone out. He braked by down-shifting, g-forces pressing me into the convertible top, blending my now tripping body down into the street, through the molten center of the Earth…

Upside down and inside out, dusk morphed to darkness and before I knew it or remembered where we’d just been we were ricocheting across Lake Shore Drive. Whimsically known by Chicagoans as “LSD,” the highway runs flush with Lake Michigan up the North Side, sporting a panoramic view of the city to the west and beaches to the east, now streaked with blazing light trails.

Minimum Headroom

In the front seats Fran and Ed were talking but I couldn’t understand a word, as if they were simultaneously far away and too faint to hear yet so close as to be shouting in my ear. The car lunged to the right, switched lanes, then hurled back to the left. “Holy shit! Did you see that?” Fran shouted, gesturing across the windshield. “No,” Ed and I said. “Good thing I’m driving,” Fran sighed.

Frans brains were annihilated, yet he inexplicably didn’t get us killed and somehow knew where we were going. On the way to wherever we stopped at a convenience store, blistering neon lights flickering like strobes. I picked up a candy bar, which melted like a Dali clock onto the vibrating linoleum floor. Chocolate oozed infinitely in every direction. I asked the clerk “How much?”

He stared at me, time froze: I left my body and saw myself stared at by a clerk in a chocolate-covered store. The store was in a city, the city was near a lake on the surface of a planet… the planet was spinning, vortex spiraling around its host star… the star was cruising through a galaxy, the galaxy spinning within a cluster… the cluster was lurking inside a Universe, suspended in…

“Dude!” My name echoed through eons across billions of light years. I blinked and was relieved that the endless chocolate was mopped up and the clerk was no longer staring at me. “Stop spacing out, man,” said Fran. “We gotta go…” Visibly older, he bought another sixer of Mickey’s, a BIC lighter, ZIG-ZAG rolling papers, and a pack of Paliament 100s with the recessed filters.

“I love these cigs,” Fran observed, “especially when doing acid.” He backed the car out without looking, and barreled headlong into speeding traffic. “Try one.” He was right. They were lighter than Ed’s harsh hand-rolled Drums, and my serotonin-agonized mind couldn’t stop chain smoking them while twirling my index finger deep inside their hollow filters, putting Freud to shame.

Several more beers, smokes, and a joint or two later the parking lot of the Eden’s Theatre in Northbrook rushed at us. We tumbled out and gazed up at the beckoning marquee: APOCALPYSE NOW. Notorious for its wide screen “surround sound” Dolby experience, the auditorium was dark and cavernous, the seats were plush and comfortable, and our acid trips were about to peak.

The late ‘70s ushered in the dawn of on-demand entertainment with home video and cable television—Betamax and VHS duking it out, MTV still a few years away. My jaw had literally dropped seeing my first VCR and how you slid a cartridge inside and could watch a film of your own choosing at home, at any time. Up to then all channels were broadcast, zero computers or Web.

Physical theatres were the apex of media entertainment, the Hollywood blockbuster era officially ignited by George Lucas and his game-changing STAR WARS. Before SW nobody imagined the same flick playing for months, generating hundreds of millions in revenue, lines around the block. Prior, you saw a film and forgot it; after, movies aimed to be a life-altering experience.

I saw the pre-CGI sci-fi classic twenty times, popped my Jedi cherry in that same Eden’s theatre, packed to capacity for a Memorial Day matinee. Images of laser-blasting stormtrooopers and dogfighting star ships were seared into my mind’s eye for months, setting the bar: None of us would ever be the same, forever yearning for a life lived a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

Three banal Earthly teen years later I again sat in that sepulchral theatre. Competing with the hit from his protégé, Francis Ford Coppola mortgaged his house and swapped plastic X-Wings with real helicopters for his Heart of Darkness-meets-Viet Nam War epic. Larger than life like its director, the movie erupted onto the effervescing screen and short-circuited my mind and body.

“Don’t Look at the Camera!”

Shunning popcorn for poppers, Fran shoved a brown bottle of amyl nitrate beneath my nostrils. I reflexively sniffed and felt the rush as a naked commando punched and shattered a mirror, hotel ceiling fans spun into churning chopper rotors, bombs thudded and jungles burned, hauntingly serenaded by Aldus Huxley-inspired Jim Morrison and his band The Doors.

The LSD had dilated my pupils, jacked my blood pressure, elevated my body temperature, made my mouth dry, and induced muscle spasms. I was hyperventilating and sweating buckets. The vivid scenes of death and destruction exacerbated these symptoms, made me want to crawl out of my skin — then leap right back inside to escape the on-screen pandemonium.

The senselessness of the war and the pointlessness of the suffering shook me. The drugs had activated my sentimental side. Throughout childhood my father chastised me for being “weak,” chronically disappointing his Holocaust-surviving Eastern European machismo. Here was proof positive, his first and only American son tripping balls and tearful over the dying and the dead.

The relentlessness of the patrol boat’s journey down the river was a testament to the director’s genius, and the primal source of my asphyxiating terror. The drugs had dissolved the proscemium arch between perception and reality, empowering the filmmaker’s implicit strategy of doing exactly the same thing on screen, and off. I became Martin Sheen; we both hunted Marlon Brando.

Gasping for air, gripping arm rests, sinking helplessly into the plush theatre chair, I furtively glanced at Fran and Ed, who were equally blown away, but exuded divergent emotions: Ed was an archetypal esthete who luxuriated in the sheer gestalt of a holistic cinematic experience; Fran was a sadistic libertine who drueled at the sight of machine-gunned women and children.

My deep existential suffering crescendoed into a self-referential frenzy at the bridge crossing scene. Distorted Jimi Hendrix licks reverberated through the POV of hallucinating soldiers and across the screams, explosions, and pornographic whispers; flairs left wide-arc’d trails as Capt. Willard asked who the commanding officer was, only to get a frantic answer: “Ain’t you?”

Fran, Ed, and I were obsessed by control because we didn’t have any. As teen burnouts we never felt comfortable at home, in school, among most of our peers. We couldn’t find solace among each other, either, so numbed ourselves into oblivion with a steady barrage of intoxicants. Stoned to the bone, we occasionally fooled ourselves into thinking we actually had our shit together.

Ed’s grandparents had emigrated from Germany after WWI. Opening a bar in Appleton, Wisconsin, they grilled bratwurst, brewed craft beer, and player piano’d Oktoberfest songs. Prohibition houdini’d them out of business, so they moved back to Frankfurt. The goosestepping began about the time of the repeal so they packed it up yet again, returned to the States, started all over.

I was always impressed by that story, especially since it so strongly contrasted with the fate of my own family in Hungary, who stayed in Budapest and were on the receiving end of genocide. Ed’s folks were the type of Germans Kurt Vonnegut often wrote about, kind people swept up in the evil bullshit of history. They were also resourceful, flexible, and way ahead of the game.

Ed inherited their boundless creativity and learned from their indefatibable spirit. I remember when I first met him, slumped in a chair and deeply immersed in The Sirens of Titan, his hair plummeting onto the dog-eared pages. He was brimming with unrealized potential, as was I. Fran acted as our foil, outrageously brash and desensitized, gaslighting our shared immaturity.

Stoned Roses

“What did you think?” Fran asked as he leaped up after what must have been his tenth viewing of the film, triumphant as Robert Duvall on the napalmed beach. “Wasn’t that awesome?” The usually demure house lights came on and seemed blindingly bright. Ed had a look of shock and awe on his face, and I was drenched in sweat, had trouble breathing. Fran gestured “Let’s rock!”

Stumbling over ourselves, scenes of the cow sacrifice looped inside my head, soundtracked by Robby Krieger’s guitar licks echoing Col. Kurtz’ dreadful “The horror… the horror…”. Fran was elated, Ed was silent, and I couldn’t shut the hell up: I heard the sound of my voice from far away, as if spoken by someone else, saying things I wanted to say before I wanted to say them.

After what seemed like hours of monologuing about the literature of Joseph Conrad, the politics of Hubert Humphrey, and the archetypes of Carl Jung they shut me down by shoving fresh joints, beers, and ciggies in my face. The parking lot expanded in every direction from Fran’s roadster as my body autonomously morphed back into the tiny crevice behind their sweaty seats.

Fran slammed the car into gear before I realized he’d rolled the convertible top down. Wind blew refreshingly into our faces and I clutched the headrests for dear life, Fran pretending he was a chopper pilot swooping on burning villages in ‘Nam. Unseasonably warm for fall, dropping only a few degrees since the afternoon, the air exploded into a dizzying frenzy of light and fire.

We tore across town and back onto Lake Shore Drive, comfortably familiar even if still madly distorted and volatile. Next stop: the Calvary Cemetery in Evanston. Flush with the lake and opposite Sheridan Road at the tip of LSD, the spooky place was one of our go-to haunts. We’d often get wasted in the graveyard first, then dash over to the beach usually patrolled by the cops.

Fran parked in a side street, and we skunked to our preferred entry point where low-hanging bushes covered the wrought iron fence. More burnout than jock, we nonetheless knew how to climb, or at least lunge over the top without skewering ourselves on the pointy posts. Once inside, we had the resting place of more than a hundred thousand Catholic souls all to ourselves.

Prowling around the shadowy vaults, monuments, and mausoleums was always enticingly macabre, this evening’s heavy drugs layering fresh dimensions of fright night creepiness onto our adventure. Spirits whispered from the darkness, leapt in front of our faces, vanished into whisps of weed smoke. We wandered aimlessly, got lost, stumbled upon our favorite shrine.

The grave of Patrick Murphy, who died on July 18, 1876, beckoned. His monument was adorned with a statue of robed and rosaried Jesus, IHS- and sunflower-engraved cross to his side, arm above his head, finger raised to Heaven suggesting the vector of the deceased’s ascent in the after-life. Fran saluted then yelled “Boo!” to initiate three-way Rock, Paper, Scissors: Ed lost.

Ed chugged a bottle of Mickey’s, tucked the empty into his army jacket, and began to climb the monument. He slipped at the pedestal base, fell back, and we caught him — “One, two, three!” — up we pushed, enough for Ed to wrap his arms around Jesus’ legs and shimmy-up the stone body until he got face-to-face with Our Savior, hugging him for support. “Kissy-kiss,” Fran taunted.

Resolute, Ed reached into his jacket and removed the bottle. Leaning heavily on one foot and holding the statue steadfast with his other arm, he stretched far as he could and delicately balanced the green grenade-shaped glass upside-down and opening-first onto the tip of Jesus’ finger. Ghosts howled as Ed carefully edged his way back down. We high-fived our bro victorious.

Turf & Surf

The celebration was instantly cut short by raging paranoia. Up until that moment we skulked invisibly among the dead, minding our own disrespectful business; but having pranked the Son of God we suddenly felt exposed, and hallucinated sinistral silhouettes eyeing us suspiciously from the dimly lit windows of sombre brownstones overlooking the graveyard’s perimeter.

“To the beach, my dudes!” commanded Fran, whose cowardliness was in direct proportion to his impulsiveness, sprinting back to the fence before Ed could brush himself off. Climbing-leaping over the sharp iron stakes, we ran after Fran into rushing traffic on Sheridan Road, the perversely skewed perspective making it impossible to accurately judge our distance from speeding cars.

Tripping deers in headlight trails, we froggered our way across the busy highway, dodging autos and miraculously staying alive. Honking horns dopplered into screaming high pitches that echoed across the sand as we ran with abandon onto the beach. We flung off our shoes and shocks, the dunes undulating beneath our feet as we splashed into the freezing lake water.

The jarring shock to my exposed flesh shot up my legs, titillated my dick and balls, shuddered throughout my chest cavity, and exploded inside my head. The electrifying clarity was breathtaking, a liberation felt by Fran and Ed, too, who with zero hesitation threw off all their clothes and shamelessly ran buck naked into the frothing waves, diving beneath the moonlit water’s surface.

Time to choose, first willful act of the night for me: join my compadres within the cold and wet, deep and dark — or stay dry on the beach, out of sight and out of my mind. On cue with my uncertainty and indecision time sped up, slowed down, sped back up, the shouts of Fran and Ed proportionately rising and falling in frequency and volume, Micky Mouse whines to Goofy guffaws.

“Spitzzzzzzzzzzz…” Fran called out into the white noise of the waves crashing on the shore, the streaming traffic up the highway, the wind reverberating between the cityscape buildings. My elementary school classmates used to jeer at my name and spit at me — until Olympian Mark Spitz won his record 7 gold medals, the quantum leap from Zero to Hero throwing me for a loop.

Ever since then I became a last-name kind of guy, the single-syllable abruptness and sharp ‘tz” at the end phonetically fitting my wiry frame and impulsive ADHD personality. Tonight’s clarion call through acid-enhanced filters summoned me into the frigid waters like a snake charmer’s hypnotic melody when without a second thought I, too, got naked and dashed in.

“Spitzzzzzzzzzzz… is the shitzzzzzzzzzzz…” Fran laughed in between fountains of filthy lake water blown from his mouth. I shuddered and swam toward the grinning head and spinning cylinder of water above, rotating in the air and somehow turning into a tiny tornado. Where was Ed? As if summoned by my mind he dolphin-bobbed into view and dived back into the murky deep.

The ice cold lake was numbing, cleansing, and purifying. I sensed true buoyancy, a zero-g womb-like environment that dissolved the boundaries between mind, body, and world. Suspended within 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water taking on the maternal responsibilities of surrounding, protecting, and calming me, I was a postmodern punk immersed within a prenatal reality.

The euphoria lasted for about three tripmesters until a sharp object below tore into my foot. The seering pain shot up my leg, through my spine, and roared into my brain, birthing an out-of-body experience: I floated a hundred feet above, saw myself swimming with Fran and Ed below, then flew to the beach where I was already sitting, watching myself watching myself fly in.

Starry Fright

I re-entered my body and found myself fully clothed again except for my shoes and socks, assuringly placed right next to me. Ed and Fran were still lolling in the lake, their shouts of joy indistinguishable from cries of terror. If they drowned I would have to retrieve their bodies, perform last rites, and bury them. I dug my hands into the cool damp sand, feeling every grain, so groovy.

My punctured foot throbbed, heart pounded, blood circulated, a salty metallic liquid flow that reminded me of the big dark lake and my friends who might still be alive in there. Living or dead they lurked below a mirrored surface that stretched infinitely into a hazy horizon that never met the dome of a cloud-shrouded sky. Time accelerated again, clouds circulating in frenzied motion.

Years later I would view Van Gogh’s paintings in their three dimensional glory at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Studying them in books does their astonishingly layered topography no justice, thick paint rising above the canvas in tortuous peaks and valleys, each masterpiece an entire universe unto itself. Was the savant on drugs? Where does madness end, art begin?

Behind me the cars racing up and down the northern tip of LSD were fast as Speed Racer at Mach 5, leaving long overlapping trails, reminding me of the machine gun tracers in the horrific film we’d just seen. The time dilation had an even more dramatic effect on the swirling clouds above, chaotically morphing into bizarre shapes embossed across the shimmering sky’s vault.

A fluffy cloud stopped, spiraled clockwise, transformed into the split face of an old, bearded man, who started talking to me. Not new to hallucinogens, having already experienced some weird shit, this one hands-down took the prize. The vision was so jarring that I had to recruit my “Third Eye,” the self watching my hallucinating self hallucinate, just to get a grip and hang on.

Was I actually seeing and hearing this? I was. Cloud angel’s voice was alien-sounding yet hauntingly familiar, his words unintelligible yet emotionally soothing. I couldn’t discern his accent or meaning— was his timbre tenor or baritone, was his language ancient or modern? I blanched again, double- and triple-checked this was really happening to me. It was. He kept talking.

Dreams are bizarre enough — having them while awake all the stranger. Where do dreams come from? Which part of us is dreaming, which part experiencing that dream? What’s the boundary between dreamer, dream, and dream observer? Now I grappled with another view, my fully conscious self, observing the observer of the woke dreamer, dreaming dreams while awake.

The LSD had annihilated once-sacrosanct sensory, cognitive, and emotional divides. I appreciated the meridian lines surrounding me, the singularities between fright and flight, audience and artform, life and death, water and sky, lake and sand, dream and dreamer. The dangers here were becoming painfully manifest, the reason many people lose their minds while on drugs.

I held on. The face kept speaking, faster now. Mouth moved, eyebrows furrowed, indecipherable words echoed across the sky. I felt profound mystery, egregious agony and boundless ecstasy, not wanting the show to ever stop — until long shadows appeared on all sides. I swung around: streetlights along the highway cast swaying silhouettes of my own seated body.

When I gazed back up the clouds had dissipated and the ancient face had vanished, the scintillating sky silent except for the howling wind. Lonely, I yearned to join Fran and Ed again within the cold, dark, murky lake. Dying together we’d eternally lurk below, occasionally haunt the shores, taunt future generations of tripping teen burnouts with our ghoulish prankster hijinx.

The Home Front

Next thing I remember we’re back in Fran’s roadster, damp but refreshed, smoking another joint and finishing the last of the Mickey’s. The intense hallucinations had tapered off, our minds lubricated with booze and tweaked with weed. But reality still hadn’t fully recalibrated as we pulled up to a traffic light near Ed’s house. We gawked at the signals, trying to figure them out.

“Is the light red, yellow, or green?” Fran nonchalantly asked, squinting through the dirty windshield. “They all look purple to me,” Ed said, riding shotgun. “Spitz, you’re the misunderstood genius, what do you think?” Folded like a six-foot human accordion in the back crevice, I had to crook my neck to get a viewable angle. “The bright purple light is at the bottom, so must be green.”

“Advance to ‘Go’!” screamed Fran — pedal to the metal, shifting into third, MG Midget engine roaring, tires squealing — “collect two hundred dollars!” The burst of acceleration thrust me back against the folded convertible top, which I now noticed was open again, the momentum nearly hurling me out the back as I desperately clutched their headrests and assumed the fetal position.

Fran’s 8-track player blasted Black Sabbath, his musical tastes more conventional than Ed’s nuanced post-punk picks. Hanging on for dear life, at that moment I appreciated the band’s head-nodding groove and Ozzie’s hypnotic vocals of “Paranoid” — All day long I think of things, but nothing seems to sa-tis-fy — Think I’ll lose my mind, if I don’t find something to pa-ci-fy…

We pulled into the driveway of Ed’s house and made a concerted effort to chill, knowing his parents were likely still up. Although we’d been acting like shameless fools in public for the past five or six hours, we now felt acutely accountable. I even checked my watch, phosphorescent big arm at 2 and small arm at 10, the night still young, the partying to continue if we kept our cool.

Ed’s basement bedroom was our Stoner HQ, down a long flight of steps and opposite the laundry room. Bespoke and quirky just like Ed, to the right of the door was a tall draftsman’s desk covered in art supplies and illuminated by a standing jeweler’s lamp; his unmade twin-sized futon ran flush with the far wall, opposite which a vintage sound system and speakers stood like a shrine.

We piled in, closed the door, and assumed our ground state: Ed at the stereo cranking early Cure and King Crimson; Fran in the far corner smirking smugly, smoking Parliaments, ashing into a potted weed plant; and Your Humble Narrator sitting on a broken wicker chair, babbling non-stop about the glacial origins of Lake Michigan and the personas of Kabbalistic spirits.

“The talking head in the sky looked just like the Archangel of the Tenth Sephiroth, Megatron,” I explained. “Half his face covered in blinding white light, the other half obscured by the ‘Infinite Negative Light’ of YHWH, who’s omnipresence and omniscience precludes mere mortals from ever comprehending Him, all that data and power imploding like a Black Hole...”

“Drink this,” Fran insisted, “it’s called ‘Shut the Fuck Up Juice’ — you’ll love it…” While yabbering I hadn’t noticed both guys had left the room, raided the refrigerator, and brought back a 12-pack of Beck’s. We were at that late phase in acid trips when the brain, overwhelmed by sensory overload, is exhausted — yet serotonin receptors remain agonized, resulting in raw crackling nerves.

Beer, lots of it, lubricated the crash. Dehydration from the incessant sweating made us insatiably thirsty, too. We pounded them down, one after another. I was first too busy drinking to talk, then too drunk to be talking again, Fran’s mission accomplished. Six beers in I had to pee, left for the bathroom, and staggered back up the steps to find myself face-to-face with Ed’s father.

Meet the Parent

About the same age then as I am now, similar to his son he was stocky and dark-haired, friendly but taciturn. We’d never exchanged more than a passing hello, but he made his commanding presence felt via his glorious Oktoberfest bierhaus piano playing, which thundered throughout the expansive suburban house on Sunday afternoons. His favorite was Essellied, the “Donkey Song.”

Now in front of him stood a drunk jackass, slack-jawed and still tripping his brains out. “He-knows-that-I-know-that-he-knows-that-I’m-on-drugs,” I thought, a sentiment Ed’s father acknowledged through a quizzical Mr. Spock-like single eyebrow raise. I suddenly remembered their terrific family stories, and felt I had so much I wanted to ask this guy, so much I wanted to tell him.

The only son of Hungarian-Jews, I was raised reform, religion a distant second to the cultural and historical identity programming. Forced by my own father to attend grueling years of Hebrew School that led up to my bar mitzvah at age 13, I was taught pointless rituals, mythologized history, and how everyone hated the Jews, especially the Nazis who killed millions of us.

Somewhere along the way the statements “all Nazis are German” and “all Germans are Nazis” became a tautology, the Ground Zero of Jewish paranoia targeted at the heart of the Aryan soul. Thankfully a product feature of my misfit, burnout, slacker teen status was the skeptical rejection of tribal Group Think, which burned away the cynical racism and xenophobia I was taught.

I therefore had no problem with Ed as my best friend, and actually embraced it with all the more zeal knowing he was exactly the kind of kid bitter rabbis and my own jaded father dismissed as a prima facie genocidal maniac. Extrapolate this contrarian sentiment ten-fold to Ed’s dad, whose family twice-emigrated from the Fatherland after witnessing their first “Sieg, Heil.”

All this rushed through my addled mind at once, but all that erupted from my drunken motor-mouth was the slurred, “Are you going to play the pia — ?” — I was slipping, grabbing the flimsy wooden banister, suddenly tumbling, the world spinning— “noooooooooooo! — ” Boom, thud, boom-boom, THUD. I blacked out, came to, gazed up the wrecked steps into the eyes of Ed’s father.

Either a product of shame, brain damage, or a combination of both, I remember nothing until Ed, Fran, and I were outside on the lawn, headed back to the car. Someone’s leg crossed mine, and I defensively kicked back, a fist striking my solar plexus, all three of us going down onto the mildewy grass. I could hardly see, but thanks to the close quarters didn’t need to.

What probably looked like a ridiculous WWF match choreographed by Jerry Lewis or Quentin Tarantino, three completely wasted teenagers went mano-a-mano, two against one, the one hopelessly uncoordinated and near-sighted yet on the defensive and determined. Fran was the first to pull away and quit; he rolled off the lawn, his nodding head and lit cigarette tokens of surrender.

Ed and I continued unabaited, circling around each other, grappling, tackling, wrestling, punching, and kicking. Feeling no pain, we were numbed by the steady input of alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, and LSD. He was lividly pissed off by my performance with his dad, the beer no doubt triggering ample aggression to fill the encroaching void left by the dissipating hallucinogens.

But something else seemed to be going on as we tumbled across the yard. Back in the 1970s only sissies and drag queens were gay, people said “faggot” constantly, and homosexuality was a “sociopathic personality disturbance” in the DSM-II. By the end of the decade progress was being made, but suburban teens like us had no frame of reference, had no idea what any of that meant.

Fourth & Goal

Fran reluctantly drove me home after Ed and I brushed ourselves off, fist-pumped, and made peace. That wouldn’t be the last time we tried to drunkenly kick each other’s asses, the brash physicality never consummating into anything sexual between us. But the weirdness paradoxically gave it ever the more gravitas, similar to the illegality of the drugs we enjoyed so much.

I finally rode shotgun in the MG roadster, the seat too small and legroom too short but a marked improvement from lying across the back. Whether because the drugs were thinning or Ed was gone or both, Fran seemed like a different person: he drove calmly and carefully, spoke slowly and coherently, asked me questions and responded thoughtfully. I was bored and missed the old Fran.

We pulled up to my house some time past 1am, tomorrow a school day. I’d have to sneak inside and upstairs without waking my parents. I thanked Fran for the alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, and asked if I still owed him any money. “Gimme another twenty,” he said. As the car left he stuck his head out the window. “Nice Nipponese plants, young son,” and vanished into the night.

I stumbled past my father’s bonsai garden, as if seeing them for the first time. My father snugly fit the stereotype of people who hated other people, yet had a green thumb and loved animals. Speaking of which, as I opened the front door I was greeted by our bulldog, a Boston Terrier named Max, who somehow sensed whenever I was on drugs. He sighed and went back to sleep.

Trying to avoid making noises I of course made even more — loud footsteps, dropping things, doors slamming — but my parents’ slept soundly. The year before had been a manic-depressive freshman hell of chronic insomnia and suicide attempts; they snoozed right through them all. Finally in bed tonight, I was still totally jacked, utterly exhausted but still hours from falling alseep.

I grabbed my favorite standby, Mattel’s classic “Electronic Football” handheld game. State-of-the-art for the late 70s, harbinger of digital gaming now ubiquitous on smartphones that pack a billion times the computing power, I would spend hours staring at the LED blips, even when sober. Still high, the thrills and spills were magnified as I held the screen flush with my eyeballs.

Football players were represented literally as tiny red lights on the screen, pixel points you tapped up/down/forward/back buttons to dodge defenders and run gaps. A primal combo of Space Invaders and Defender with Vegas slot machine whirling and twirling sounds, fourth down optioned play or “kick,” you were always on the offense, the stakes as high as the batteries lasted.

Breathtaking action for 1979, face-in-the-screen and drugs-still-in-my-head created an ersatz VR experience, each pixel a gigantic fuzzy red sphere in jagged motion through a two dimensional finite plane. The “football running back” obeyed every finger-pressed command, my field of vision completely consumed by this self-contained universe of blurry blobs and blurping bleeps.

Knock, knock. Did I just hear that? So much of this evening’s stimuli came from inside my head, perception shifting into reality and reality messing around with perception that I at first couldn’t tell. Knock, knock. Did the sounds come from within or without, close by or far away? Before I could decide the door slowly slid open, and I saw my mother’s face peer inside.

She still suffered from chronic postpartum depression triggered by my birth, exacerbated by a second emigration, and reinforced by marrying an asshole. Throughout my childhood she smothered me with terror and love, deeply blending flight with vulnerability. My teen years had already made their expression manifest: to compensate I became a stubbornly defiant outcast.

Long Night’s Journey into Day

Tonight felt different. Maybe she sensed euphoria, my cathartic release from objective reality, and that calmed her. Or maybe today’s madness influenced how I perceived her, a projection of acid-laced awareness onto her otherwise manic depressive soul? Regardless, she smiled and I smiled back — or I smiled and she smiled back — I can’t be sure, but remember we both smiled, a first.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” she asked in her native Hungarian, which I understood but by this age was uncomfortable speaking. “Yes,” I replied in English, looking up from the primitive video game and non-verbally suggesting I was fine and having fun, a premonition of what her grandkids would be doing all day and all night in a few digitally-obsessive decades.

Perplexed but appeased, her face disappeared into the shadows and the door creeped closed as awkwardly as it opened. Our wretched household was a toxic bubble of silence or screams, helpless apathy or savage hysteria, utterly devoid of conversation or connection. I never had the courage to break from these vile patterns, so treated my toxic parents as badly as they treated me.

This evening’s whirlwind adventure yanked me outside myself, offered a fresh frame of reference, made me even more introspective than usual. I was beginning to realize how I took everything for granted, the extent to which I relied on others to lift me out of my own despair. I always had smart-ass answers for everything, “knew” so much yet actually did so little.

So I leapt out of bed, threw the video game into the garbage, sat at my desk, grabbed a notebook and pen, and wrote a letter: I understood that the past influenced my future only if I allowed it, and that the present was ripe with extraordinary possibilities that demanded honesty and integrity. I vowed to invite family and friends into my transformation, starting with Fran and Ed...

Thanks for paying attention, but no, I didn’t do any of these things. Instead I thought about my mom and her sadness for a few seconds, then thrust my face right back into the video game and plunged into its virtual world. The ridiculously simple rules and rigidly defined boundaries were cozy and reassuring; hours flew by until the first light of dawn illuminated my room.

I had just risked my life on Chicago’s highways, witnessed the death of innocents, defiled sacred ground, swam in an ancient lake, summoned an archangel, been nice to my mom, and committed a dozen felonies along the way— but for all the exhilarating mayhem and out-of-mind-and-body experiences, I had learned nothing that would actually change my behaviors.

Meanwhile a few miles away another childhood friend embarked on a different kind of trip. An only child like me, Pete had his own challenges: his mom was an emotionally distant librarian-type who asked what books you hadn’t read; his dad was a gym coach and sportscaster who played drill sergeant at home, forcing Pete to become all the things he wasn’t.

I don’t remember the exact details, most of which were hearsay, but everyone knew Pete snapped and hit the road. Trekking cross-country and gone for months, he parlayed his charisma and friendliness into survival skills, ultimately winding up at a distant relative’s place in the Rockies. His parents finally tracked him down and had him delivered back, nothing ever the same.

Pete’s story stunned me. Where did he get the courage to take action and run away? Then I recalled an afternoon we spent arguing whether the live or studio version of a Led Zeppelin song was better: Despite my detailed analysis he was the one spinning the records, so we listened to his choice, not mine. That’s where it comes from, doing it. Shut up and make your move, now.

Day Tripper

Decades later I caught up with Pete, who went on to become a courier for the Masters of the Universe at the Chicago Board of Trade. Eminently likable, Pete was taken under their wing, sent on airplanes delivering securities notes, and when on the ground taught how to day trade. That became his career, making him as fiercely independent in adulthood as he had been in adolescence.

Back in my bedroom, the morning sun coaxed me into Monday. I switched off the video game and took an ice cold shower that partially revived me. I slugged espresso, skipped breakfast, then shambled into school with zero sleep and frayed nerves. Despite the fatigue, I looked forward to extending our stoner credo of maintaining our cool while wasted, this time post hoc.

The night before I stretched the boundaries of space and time, traveled billions of light years and returned more or less intact. Now I sat in history class surrounded by well-rested and fully-engaged peers, and nobody noticed or cared. The good news was I could fly under the radar, be seen yet unseen, sail through the rest of the day without calling any attention to myself…

“Guess who digs Spitzy?!” someone catcalled, awakening me from my falsely assuring revelry. Classmates pointed and grinned, whispers and laughter from every angle. Just because I was paranoid didn’t mean this wasn’t actually happening to me, reality confirmed and next steps urged by the Varsity quarterback who leaned over and commanded, “Ask her out on a date, bro.”

Ask whom? Ask Lucy, of course — blushing as brightly as me, she was tall and attractive, demure and intelligent. Sure enough, there she sat just a few desks away, smiling back at me, a win for any kid my age, let alone one so hopelessly lost in situations like this. Aghast, I fidgeted, grimaced, and shrugged, unable to look at her or look away from her, Mr. Loud Mouth at a loss for words.

Our history teacher mercifully called order and carried on, today’s topic the Fall of Rome. “Does anyone remember the death of Julius Caesar?” he asked, starting today’s class where we’d left off. “Forty-four BC,” someone shouted, eliciting sarcastic applause. The Ides of March? I tried to rebound from my excruciating Lucy fumble by shfting into Full Smart-Ass: “March 15th!”

It worked, the entire class erupting with ooo’s and ahh’s, cheers and applause. My reputation as awkward but brilliant stoner was temporarily reinforced — but at the cost of turning off Lucy, who most likely liked me for being me, and not the story of me I created to shield myself from fears of her rejection. Yet again I felt smothered with terror and love, blending flight with vulnerability.

I never dated Lucy, even though she offered herself on a silver platter, stamp of approval from the entire sophomore history class. The previous night I could even have had sex with Ed, for fuck sakes, the world a realm of infinite possibility. What was wrong with me? What was I afraid of? A bibliophile and voracious reader, I seemed to know everything, yet really didn’t have a clue.

Back in the late ‘70s much of American society didn’t, either. The 21st century has since ushered in a reconsideration and resurgence of hallucinogens — serotonergic psychedelics from LSD to 2C-B, psilocybin to mescaline, and DMT to MDMA now used by the healthcare system to treat medical conditions ranging from PTSD to OCD, alcoholism to depression, headaches to marriage.

Trippin’ with Fran & Ed was irresponsible and dangerous, but in retrospect was also brazen and precocious. Sure we were misfits, burnouts, and slackers, yet we’d tapped into the chemical wisdom of the psychedelic “Blow Your Mind” hippy generation prior to us — while actively anticipating the posh microdosing “Change Your Mind” transformative generation ahead.

Hot Flub Time Machine

Having gone back in time, knowing what I know now, I choose to tell my younger self nothing that has to do with advice, warnings, hopes, or dreams. I also disavow both of us from any feelings of pride, shame, excitement, or fear. Neither pollyanna nor pessimist, I would prefer we simply connect, and he put down the Electronic Football game long enough to pay close attention:

Our brains seem to remember everything, yet we only recall certain things, usually for good reason. That makes recalling specific experiences from decades ago compelling, since we wonder why these memorable moments stand out, and others become lost forever. Reminiscining doesn’t change the past, but selective memory can influence and even enable future possibility.

Feeling like you have nothing to lose turns loss into an advantage, at least until you realize adding on beats taking things away. Shifting focus from destruction to creation and cynicism to opportunism is fought for and won more with attitude than aptitude. Nobody cares about the risks you took, how insightful you are, how deep you’re willing to go. or how hard you tried.

At the core of teenage angst is disappointment with oneself and the world. Between self and universe is a gaping, seemingly infinite chasm brimming with exhilarating potential flush with daunting danger. The dynamic tension between attraction and repulsion makes escapism in whatever form particularly enticing. Running both towards and away, all teens run.

Whether psychedelics open the doors to perception or close the ones to responsibility remains to be seen. Looking back my own indulgence did both, since I discovered so much about myself and the world, yet failed to fully absorb or practically apply any of those lessons. Like most powerful tools in life, drugs shed light but it’s up to you to look, listen, learn, and share.

On the plane returning to his parents, Pete allegedly ingested half a sheet of blotter acid, arriving so wasted that he couldn’t even speak. I remember his father describing what a mess he was, how thank goodness he’d fully recovered, the family together again. What struck me then as it strikes me now is how Pete decided to trip his brains out on his way back, not out.

Fran, Ed, and I applied the opposite strategy to expected effect. Bored with ourselves and each other, intimidated by the world’s potential and frightened of its danger, we drove intoxicated, watched horrific war movies, desecrated cemeteries, nearly drowned, and woke up our parents. But unlike Pete we always played it safe, never made a real break, didn’t ask Lucy on a date.

Same could be said for the philosopher hippies who inspired us, and the Millennial Gen-Nexters following in our psychedelic footsteps. Map vs territory, therapy vs real world battles, youthful exuberance vs tarnished wisdom, drugs vs reality — life offers no substitute for gritty determination, relentless focus, and hard work. We have no short cuts on the long way home.

At long last I find Colonel Kurtz, lean close to my teen self, stare into his still-dilated pupils, eyes bloodshot from hours of drug and video game abuse. I promised not to give advice, share dreams, or trigger emotions. I lied, but hopefully for a good cause, the ends eventually justifying the means akin to our years of juvenile delinquency. He‘s surprised I’m bald, stares back at me.

“Here’s all you need to know,” I whisper. “Our parents are crazy, run away. Math skills better than you think, pursue science. A good writer, keep typing. ” “That’s it?” my teen self smirks. “Oh,” I add, “Susan Goodson the cowgirl from Texas will ask you to prom junior year — accept her offer this time, dumb ass.” What would you tell your younger self? Would they listen? Bleep, bleep.